What would be the scariest thing to hear as a VP of Product?
Like if you assistant or team came up to you- what would be the scariest thing to hear as the VP of Product?
I’ve been thinking about this question for the past several days and honestly couldn’t think of a single answer; I could think of many. Being at the top of a product organization there are many things that could be scary to hear and I don’t think anyone of them trump another. I thought to best explain this would be to list a few (I am sure there are more).
“It didn’t work” — This is an open-ended one and could be simply describing a day to day issue or, at its scariest, a product launch. This has also happened to me. Although the basis of product theory is to work in small iterations, failing fast and reacting faster, you always have a launch event when you come out of development. Even small launched can become large, quickly — especially when they falter.
“Product Manager X is quitting” — I’ve been lucky in my career for this phrase to only come up a few times, but it is fairly destructive and quite scary. A well-oiled product machine gives a tremendous amount of autonomy to each product team to run their own business, chase product features and functions that follow a larger strategy and solve business problems in a way that they deem feasible. Product teams function like micro-companies, with their product managers being their CEO. Although larger product teams have assistant product managers, they usually don’t have the big picture or future roadmap that the product manager does, so when one leaves the product can suffer dramatically. As a product leader, it is my responsibility to understand what each and every product is doing, where it is going and what each product manager’s vision entails but the subtlety can be lost at scale. I try to meet with each of my product managers every day in a stand up to get a download of what’s next and also after each sprint, month and quarter to get an understanding of where they are headed so if that day does come I can temporarily step in and make sure no momentum is lost.
“The data was wrong” — A product manager and team base most decisions and iterations made to a product on data that is collected, analyzed and acted on. In some cases, the data that is presented could be wrong and it is very difficult to know that before changes made on that data are made. This can be catastrophic to a product, especially in its early days when traction is vital. I have seen changes made to onboarding, workflows, and transactions that resulted in disastrous outcomes because they were based on incorrect data.
“There’s a new CEO/CTO/CIO” — I am only listing this one because it has the potential to be “scary” for a single reason — the new C-level leader doesn’t understand or hasn’t been part of a product based organization and can make changes with their team or strategy that removes the autonomy the product teams and their engineers embrace to be successful.
